Advertising delivers messages designed to motivate an individual to take a desired action, which typically is to make a product purchase. The goal of advertising is to attract the attention of persons who might take the desired action, hold their attention while the program of messaging is presented, and motivate such persons to take the desired action. Empirical evidence suggests that advertising that is more successful at attracting and holding the attention of persons is also more successful at motivating persons to take the desired action, such as making a purchase. In addition, targeting the advertisement to the appropriate audience can increase the effectiveness of producing the desired action, such as making a purchase.
In general, it is difficult to develop a single advertisement that can attract and hold the attention of the full range of potential viewers. Many different factors have been found to influence the success of an advertisement and therefore to suggest the best program content. Products are often useful to and therefore are targeted to a particular demographic group. More broadly useful products are targeted in the way that they are advertised to different demographic groups. The timing of the presentation as to time of day, week, year, and the like can also influence the success of a program. Known traffic and environment in the intermediate area around a presentation unit can be used to affect the success of a program. Similarly, the geographic region, current local season or weather may influence the response of persons to a program. In addition, knowing the characteristics, such as gender, age, etc., of the individual can be used to tailor the advertisement to generate a more effective advertisement. Thus, it has been found preferable to provide a number of advertisements, each potentially having features that are adapted for different factors. The selection of programs to be offered to individuals typically is done by analyzing collected data comprising sales of the promoted products, the number of persons interacting with the presentation unit, a count of casual individuals/observers, or some combination of such performance characteristics.
Although electronic billboards and other forms of active advertising devices are known, a shortcoming that presently exists relates to the inability to automatically accurately target an advertisement to the appropriate audience. Known advertising devices operate by projecting advertising information at large, regardless of the presence or absence and without any knowledge of characteristics of the recipients of this information. Simply issuing advertising information according to some predetermined program is not the most effective way of reaching potential consumers and impacting the market for the product being promoted.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,696, Giraud discloses an active system that tracks consumer exposure to a number of different advertisements and exposes the consumer to several different advertisements. The system is able to count the number of people who look in the direction of a specific advertisement within a specified distance from that advertisement. The system thus offers a means to do accounting relative to the number of people who saw a given advertisement. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,504,675, Cragun et al. disclose an active system that automatically selects a sales promotion program from among a plurality of programs using a neutral network. The goal of the system of the '675 patent is to choose an advertisement that has the greatest likelihood of success in arousing the interest of a viewer in the intermediate area of the presentation unit. A limitation of both of these systems is that they don't take into account the characteristics of the individual in determining the advertisement presented to the individual.
Thus there is a need to provide a system that permits the real-time selection of informational material for presentation and availability to individuals based upon current contributing conditions and the characteristics (such as demographics, psychographics, cohort group, identity, etc.) of the individual(s) obtained by non-obtrusive data gathering. The present invention solves the problem of targeting the informational material to the customer and thus increases the effectiveness of this information in reaching potential consumers.
The prior art also fails to provide a method for the display of advertising information wherein an advertising display device/system is able to sense the presence and obtain characteristics of individuals in the immediate environment and select a specific advertising content/program to improve the effectiveness of the display device based upon the obtained characteristics of one or more sensed individuals.
It is also desirable to provide an environment-aware display system comprising a display means to display information, a sensing means to detect one or more individuals and identify characteristics of the one or more individuals, and a programmed processor to select advertising information based upon the sensed characteristics of the one or more individuals.
There is also a need in the prior art to providean environment-aware display system optionally includes a connection to a network so that advertising information content and processor programming instructions can be downloaded remotely.
The prior art also fails to integrate sales (e.g. local cash register) information with the environment-aware display system so that sales data may form an input to the programmed processor.